Sue Grafton: 'My childhood ended when I was five'

The novelist talks about growing up with alcoholic parents, and how it shaped her writing and led to her fictional alter ego, Kinsey Millhone. And, below, we publish an extract from her latest book, Kinsey and Me

Sue Grafton: 'It took me a long while to allow myself to feel anything positive towards my mother.'
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Most novelists prefer to maintain a distance between themselves and their characters; it preserves a veneer of sanity. If not always one of mystery. Sue Grafton, author of the best-selling alphabetical detective series that began with A is for Alibi in 1982 and is now up to V is for Vengeance, has seldom made any effort to separate herself from her fictional creation, PI Kinsey Millhone. Rather she has often muddied the waters as much as possible, by saying: "Kinsey is my alter ego – the person I might have been had I not married young and had children."

In her latest book, Kinsey and Me, Grafton has gone even further to spell out how blurred the distinctions sometimes are by making clear that Kinsey's existence allows her to lead two lives – "hers and mine". "Like Kinsey," she writes, "I've been married and divorced twice (though I'm currently married to husband number three and intend to remain so for life). The process of writing informs both her life and mine. While our biographies are different, our sensibilities are the same ... I think of us as one soul in two bodies and she got the good one ... Often I feel she's peering over my shoulder, whispering, nudging me and making bawdy remarks ... It amused me that I invented someone who has gone on to support me. It amuses her, I'm sure, that she will live in this world long after I'm gone."

Kinsey Millhone, then, is Grafton by another name. Grafton in a parallel universe. Just why Grafton might, more than most of us, have felt the need to create another version of her life is spelled out in a series of autobiographical short stories written during the 10 years after her mother died in 1960. What is remarkable about these stories is not just their brutal honesty, but that they are also written variously in the first, second and third person with all the family members' names changed – Grafton becomes Kit, her mother Vivian becomes Vanessa, and her sister Ann is Del. "I had no intention of being deliberately tricksy," she says. "I just wrote them as I experienced them. Looking back, I can only guess that some parts were so painful that I couldn't stop distancing myself from them. It's no coincidence that Kinsey was orphaned at five years old, when her parents were killed in a car crash: I also felt that my childhood ended when I was five."

Sue Grafton, age three, and her six-year-old sister, with their mother and father. Public Domain

Grafton was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1940. Her father, CW Grafton, was a lawyer and occasional writer of detective fiction; her mother seldom left the house. Both were alcoholics: CW a functioning one, Vivian manifestly not. "Every morning," she writes, "my father downed two jiggers of whiskey and went to the office. My mother, similarly fortified, went to sleep on the couch. From the age of five onward, I was left to raise myself, which I did as well as I could, having had no formal training in parenthood.

"Discipline, when it came, was arbitrary and capricious. We had no allies, my sister [older by three years] and I. When life seemed unbearable, my father, to comfort me, would sit on the edge of my bed and recount in patient detail the occasion when the family doctor had told him he'd have to choose between [my mother] and us, and he'd chosen her because she was weak and needed him and we were strong and could survive. Not surprisingly, I grew up confused, rebellious, fearful, independent, imaginative, curious, free-spirited and anxious. I wanted to be good ... I wanted to get out of that house."

By the time she was 20, Grafton had got her wish by getting married and having a baby. Her mother, meanwhile, was in hospital recovering from an operation to remove cancer in her oesophagus brought on by 15 years of drinking and smoking. "She wanted to die," Grafton says. "She'd already attempted suicide twice and was upset she'd survived the operation. Once she got home, she killed herself."

The rage Grafton felt towards her mother for the years of neglect was overwhelming and is unmediated in her writing. "I did feel an intense anger towards her," she says. "What you have to remember, though, is that at the time I wrote these stories I was still very young and the feelings were raw. I was struggling to make sense of everything that had taken place in my childhood. It took me a long while to allow myself to feel anything positive towards my mother; it's almost impossible to make peace with someone who isn't there. But I've reached a place where I've come to love her for what she was: a woman with a severe alcohol problem who did the best she could at the time."

Sue Grafton
(left) with her sister Ann, who is three years her senior. Public Domain

What also shines through Grafton's stories from this time in her life is how her father escaped unscathed from her anger. Both her parents were alcoholics, both were equally incompetent and ineffective parents: yet in Grafton's eyes, her father could do no wrong while her mother got it repeatedly in the neck. "You're right," she admits. "I did protect my father. My sister, father and I had always been allies together. We'd stick together when my mother was incapable. And even when she wasn't, she was on the outside of the family. It was hard to break that pattern of behaviour.

"My father got remarried to a partner in his law firm within a year of my mother's death, but rather than seeing this as a kind of betrayal, I was delighted. I truly believed this new woman might turn out to be the mother I had never had. And when she wasn't – she turned out to be not such a nice woman after all, despite my desperate attempts to suck up to her – I blamed her. It was only many years later, when I came to realise how much I had colluded with and protected him, that I came to have a more balanced perspective.

"I suppose I could have then written another story to even things up more in my mother's favour, but I didn't feel the need. It would have just been an intellectual exercise. The whole point of the stories about my mother was they were written from the heart in the heat of the moment; they were one of the ways I coped with everything. It's not the way my sister coped, but then we all do things differently. She has said she does not want to read Kinsey and Me in case it brings back too many painful memories and I respect her decision."

Two of the other key events in Grafton's life took place more than 20 years after her mother's death. In early 1982 her father died; a few months later her first Kinsey Millhone novel was published. "It was weird," she says. "I had spent a long time screwing up as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had finally come to the conclusion I wasn't suited to writing as part of a team. I wanted to be more in control of everything my characters did, so I decided to write detective fiction because that's what my father had done. It was an act of imitation, if not homage, which I acknowledged by dedicating A is for Alibi to him. I wanted to surprise him with the first finished copy, so he died without knowing. From that moment, I decided that if I ever had another good idea, I was going to do it right away."

There were other, less pragmatic, connections Grafton might have made between the timing of her father's death and the publication of her first detective novel. One was that by his death she had been denied a final opportunity to gain his approval; of him for once putting her achievements before his own needs. The other is the more macabre thought that her father's death liberated her in some way. That it was only with his passing that she could finally shake off the wreckage of her childhood and free herself up creatively. If not, it is quite a coincidence that her own and Kinsey's careers took off quite so spectacularly.

"It's possible," Grafton concedes, somewhat reluctantly. "Though I prefer to look at it more as me finally growing up and learning to accept who I am. I've come to realise that I'm not always that nice a person. I can be mean and I lose my temper from time to time; I'm not always as admirable a person as I'd like to be. But that's life. And it's why Kinsey is the way she is, too. In K is for Killer, she makes a phone call, knowing the call is going to get someone killed. And she doesn't feel bad about it because she thinks that person deserves to die. We all think about murdering another person on occasions; what matters is not acting on that impulse. I'm lucky to have fictional characters to do it for me."

Another consequence of being such a late developer is that Grafton has found she enjoys being a grandparent far more than she did a parent. "I had my kids when I was young," she says, "and I never had any patience with them. When they asked me to read the same story night after night, it would drive me nuts. I'd think, haven't we all heard this enough times already? Let's have something else. I was too wrapped up in my world and what I wanted to do. With my grandchildren I can sit back a bit more and let them be the people they are, rather than the ones I think they should be. I can give them the time to develop at their own pace."

Grafton goes on to say she has finally cracked the denouement of W is for … – what is W for? "I can't tell you," she laughs. Is it Witness?

"No."

Sure? "Sure." Then there's just X, Y and Z and she's done. "I've always said I'll stop at Z and I mean it," she adds. "I'll be nearly 80 by then and I'll need a rest. I can also promise you I won't kill Kinsey off." Which seems only fair because through some fictive trickery Kinsey only ages one year for every two and a half of Grafton's, so she will only be 40 by the time she reaches Z. And though Grafton seems certain to have worked through all her issues in her writing by then, Kinsey may still have one or two to deal with on her own.

A letter from my father

A few days before your 29th birthday, he writes you a letter, this father of yours, and in it, he tells you what he remembers of you.

"In the course of thinking back over your 29 years," he says, "I called to mind many charming memories (and some distressing ones as well); and among the highest ranking of them all was when you were three, just before I went into military service. I sat on your bed and you knelt to say your prayers, and after praying for all the regular and proper people, and thanking God for all the regular and proper things … you concluded with, 'And God bless Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Easter Bunny's Helper.' I don't know where the helper came from, and I didn't want to laugh at your prayers, but I nearly exploded in an effort to contain my laughter until you were in bed, had got kissed good night, and I could get downstairs.

"And in the same year, when the day came for me to put on my uniform and leave for Fort Knox, I didn't see how I could possibly say goodbye without crying all over the place, so I had to think up something. You won't remember, but what I suggested to you and Del was that instead of saying goodbye, I would come to attention, and so would you and Del – and then we would salute each other, as I had taught you to do. Del burst into tears and ran upstairs to her room, but you came to a very exaggerated state of attention, with your chest out and belly in, and chin very straight – and we saluted – and then I went out to the taxi, scarcely able to see what I was doing.

I looked back and waved, and you waved too; and then I looked up at Del's window, and she was standing there, with a handkerchief against her mouth, and she waved finally. A memory that is very sweet, and very upsetting and almost unbearable all at the same time.

"Then when I came back from military service, I remember the warm evenings, sitting on the front steps, when you and Del would beg me to tell a story. And in those evenings I made up Silly Mongoose, and the story about the little white dog and the blind horse that the French family had to leave behind when they fled in front of the German armies in 1940 – and other rambling tales I can't remember any more. Sometimes I would start one without the foggiest notion of where it was going, or how it would end … and those seemed to be the ones you liked best. Both you and Del liked the sad stories best (but with a happy ending just in the nick of time) so I invented sad ones, and more of them. One time I got so engrossed in my own story that I was crying with you! Doesn't seem possible but it's true. I had to find a happy ending for that one and in a hurry. Then I blew my nose and felt better.

"Another bittersweet memory is when they brought you down from the operating room after your tonsils were removed. You were groggy with sedation and kept urping up frightening amounts of blood and with your eyes still closed, the first thing you said was, 'I want my daddy.' So I sat by your bed and you hung on to the index finger of my right hand for ever, and I would not have moved away for any amount of money."

That letter is the story of your life, all the stuff of which you are made, so that reading it again, a year later, you are amazed to see how carefully your character has been described in the course of those paragraphs. Twenty-five years are missing in his recollection of you, and in those 25 years you have lived out all the consequences of the first four or five. There was a time in your life when you didn't believe in psychology, when you didn't believe that intelligent, rational people were the product of anything more than their own intelligence and their own rationality. Now you believe in everything; past, present, and future. You believe in memories. You believe in the suffering of truth and all that it requires. You believe that you are exactly the life-sized projection of that child sitting on the front steps of that house, listening to stories that were rescued, always, at the brink of truth.

You do remember the day your father went away. You remember your own confusion about your sister's sudden tears and her running to her room. That was not what your father had asked you to do. Your father had told you to salute and so you saluted proudly and you knew, even at the age of three, that you would do anything he asked, at whatever the cost.

Now that you are nearly 30, you are writing letters to him and what you say to him is this: we did, yes, fail in our lives, the four of us; you and Vanessa, Del and me. We died of all the unwept tears and all the things we never understood.

You talk to him about your mother's death, about her need to die, about the ways in which her death has set you free, and how her death has bound you, broken you, and mended you again. You tell him, as a mother would, that you have loved him, whatever his failings, that you forgive him, that you have failures, too, which require forgiveness of him. You tell him that you have loved your life, that you are at peace with the person you have become and that he may have that peace too in your behalf. "We none of us die of grief," you say, "but only of not grieving quite enough."

And what you want for him is that he may weep too, for himself, for the ruin of all those years. You want to say to him, "Oh, my father, don't you see that we are healed, all of us, by being exactly what we are, by loving, by remembering, by opening up the wounded places in our lives and letting go?"

You want to tell him you treasure all the relics of the past. You know now that you are a living museum, full of rooms and crooked corridors that repeat themselves at every turn. And you want to tell him that by loving you, he can love himself too, that he can choose again rightly for every cloudy choice he's made, that he can learn to have his life instead of giving it away.

And you wonder if he'll hear you, years and years away, across the wide, far country of your life, across the sins and resurrections of your soul. You wonder if he'll understand that, groggy in your life and full of pain, you call to him before you have even opened your eyes, that his presence there when you were four has reached across the world to you and touches you where you are now.

A year ago, he was tipped to be the next England manager and his Tottenham team were riding high. Today the England job is a distant memory and his new team QPR have been relegated. Is he disappointed? No, reckons his biographer John Crace

After decades of missing the big stories, cricket literature is at last addressing the dark side of the game, argues John Crace. As guest reviewer for the 150th edition of Wisden, he considers the best books in the field